Beowulf is a “heroic-elegiac” poem written in Old English describing events in mid-sixth-century Scandinavia, probably composed not long after the Christianization of England around 700. The poem presents a Christian inculturation of the Anglo-Saxon paganism of the Northern Heroic Age. J. R. R. Tolkien speaks to the poem’s beautiful balance of worldviews: “The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat, men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, [heroes under heaven], remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is), still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”